Post by s***@gmail.comHow clear is the evidence detailing the transition between Old English and Middle English? Are there on-line texts showing the language during this transition?

As I understand the situation there is no transition inthe usual sense of transition. But in part it is a matterof nomenclature. Old English is usually used in the senseof the Wessex dialect and that dialect stopped being usedabout the time of William the Conqueror. Middle Englishdescends from other poorly documented dialects that werespoken in England at the same time as "Old English".

There's a period of a century or two after the Conquest when not muchwas written in English,though the Peterborough Chronicle continued untilthe mid-1100s. After about 1200 things get more interesting.

Various theories have been put forward to explain what some see as an"abrupt" change from OE to ME, including English-French creolization.Hildegard Tristram (what a great name) has argued that the apparentabruptness results from a sociolinguistic shift. The structural changeswere underway in OE, but masked by a conservative literary dialect.Post-1066, lower-class innovative varieties became the new norm.

I'm not a specialist in the history of English, but every time I dip intoit, I learn something interesting.

Middle English is thought to descend in areas under or near Danish rule. One theory has it that the vocabulary was similar to Old Norse but the inflections made mutual intelligibility more difficult. Doing away with them in communication with the Danes led to their being dropped as a regular feature later. Old English texts came from independent Wessex which used a conservative idom for writting.

Post by s***@gmail.comHow clear is the evidence detailing the transition between Old English and Middle English? Are there on-line texts showing the language during this transition?

http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text-onlinehttp://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/http://faculty.winthrop.edu/kosterj/archives/LitClasses/midengres.htmThere's a period of a century or two after the Conquest when not muchwas written in English,though the Peterborough Chronicle continued untilthe mid-1100s. After about 1200 things get more interesting.Various theories have been put forward to explain what some see as an"abrupt" change from OE to ME, including English-French creolization.Hildegard Tristram (what a great name) has argued that the apparentabruptness results from a sociolinguistic shift. The structural changeswere underway in OE, but masked by a conservative literary dialect.Post-1066, lower-class innovative varieties became the new norm.I'm not a specialist in the history of English, but every time I dip intoit, I learn something interesting.

Post by b***@ihug.co.nzHildegard Tristram (what a great name) has argued that the apparentabruptness results from a sociolinguistic shift. The structural changeswere underway in OE, but masked by a conservative literary dialect.Post-1066, lower-class innovative varieties became the new norm.

It's not all that different from the Romance languages, is it?

(Except that in England the abandonment of the old literary standardand the emergence of a new one can be tied to a specific historicalevent.)

People kept writing in their best approximation of Classical Latin,pretending that this was the same language as the increasinglydivergent spoken vernacular. Eventually this fiction became untenableand when the dam broke, the Romance languages popped up nearly outof nowhere. Much of their development has to be inferred and piecedtogether from subtle clues.

For the development of French, everybody refers to the same threemeagre sources:* Reichenau Glosses (8th century)* Oaths of Strasbourg (842)* Sequence of Saint Eulalia (~880)Then in the 11th century people suddenly started writing a lot inOld French.